Welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 46. This periodic discussion and dissection of IT infrastructure related news and events, with a panel of industry analysts and guests, comes to you with the help of our charter sponsor, Active Endpoints, maker of the ActiveVOS, visual orchestration system, and through the support of TIBCO Software. Our topic this week on BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition centers on "business commerce clouds." As the general notion of cloud computing continues to permeate the collective IT imagination, an offshoot vision holds that multiple business-to-business (B2B) players could use the cloud approach to build extended business process ecosystems. It's sort of like a marketplace in the cloud on steroids, on someone else's servers, perhaps to engage on someone's business objectives, and maybe even satisfy some customers along the way. I, for one, can imagine a dynamic, elastic, self-defining, and self-directing business-services environment that wells up around the needs of a business group or niche, and then subsides when lack of demand dictates. It's really a way to make fluid markets adapt at Internet speed, at low cost, to business requirements, as they come and go. The concept of this business commerce cloud was solidified for me just a few weeks ago, when I spoke to Tim Minahan, chief marketing officer at Ariba. I've invited Tim to join us to delve into the concept, and the possible attractions, of business commerce clouds. We're also joined by this episode's IT industry analyst guests: Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis; Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink; JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant, and Sandy Kemsley, independent IT analyst and architect. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.View a full transcript, or download a copy. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints. Also sponsored by TIBCO Software.Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint's ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.

Text-based content and information from across the Web are growing in importance to businesses. The need to analyze web-based text in real-time is rising to where structured data was in importance just several years ago.
Indeed, for businesses looking to do even more commerce and community building across the Web, text access and analytics forms a new mother lode of valuable insights to mine. As the recession forces the need to identify and evaluate new revenue sources, businesses need to capture such web data services for their business intelligence (BI) to work better, deeper, and faster. In this podcast discussion, Part 3 of a series on web data services for BI, we discuss how an ecology of providers and a variety of content and data types come together in several use-case scenarios. In Part 1 of our series we discussed how external data has grown in both volume and importance across the Internet, social networks, portals, and applications. In Part 2, we dug even deeper into how to make the most of web data services for BI, along with the need to share those web data services inferences quickly and easily. Our panel now looks specifically at how near real-timetext analytics fills out a framework of web data services that can form a whole greater than the sum of the parts, and this brings about a whole new generation of BI benefits and payoffs. Here to help explain the benefits of text analytics and their context in web data services are Seth Grimes, principal consultant at Alta Plana Corp., and Stefan Andreasen, co-founder and chief technology officer at Kapow Technologies. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. View a full tranascript. Or download a copy. Sponsor: Kapow Technologies.